Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday November 06, 2007 @04:31PM
from the you-want-agar-agar-with-that dept.

circletimessquare writes "Using ingredients usually relegated to the lower half of the list of ingredients on a Twinkies wrapper, some professional chefs are turning themselves into magicians with food. Ferran Adrià in Spain and Heston Blumenthal in England have been doing this for years, but the New York Times updates us on the ongoing experiments at WD-50 in New York City. Xanthan Gum, agar-agar, and other hydrocolloids are being used to bring strange effects to your food. Think butter that doesn't melt in the oven, foie gras you can tie into knots, and fried mayonnaise."

Seriously, though, I come from a cooking family. My dad and two of my brothers were pros, and damned good ones.The important thing about deep frying is that the results should not be fatty. You don't want much, if any fat in your fried foods. That's why you fry a white fish like hake or haddock for your fish and chips. You don't fry a fatty fish like salmon or swordfish, because even if your crust was perfect, the fish itself would be dense where you want it to light and tender. I normally prefer a fat

As the review says, deep-fried soda really doesn't count - you have to preserve the original food as a significant fraction of the fried food, or else you just have soda-flavored fried batter. I wouldn't add a few drops of vanilla to my pancakes and say I had fried vanilla. "Fried ice cream" isn't fried ice cream if the whole thing is simply mixed into a liquid batter beforehand.To encapsulate a liquid and fry it safely, you need skill. Cherry cordials with a little bit of viscous cherry syrup are the

Food scientist are the people who make sure that all the food or product come to you are the same. Think McDonalds and how it is the same, no matter where in the world you are. The chefs who are using chemestry to add to their foods are just doing it for show and taste.

Your friends went into food from being chemistry undergrands (I suppose). These guys are master chefs that are reaching into chemistry for tools. Food + Chemistry for both. But the paths taken (and end results) are completely different

That ice cream was spooky stuff though. We tried some at university at a meeting of the Socialist Workers Party. All the people who ate it now work for the Conservative Party. Some of the girls turned up with blue rinse hair and pearls before the end of the week.

Heston Blumenthal's Kitchen Chemistry series (which unfortunately didn't make it) was a lot more interesting than this article. You can even find torrents of the pilot episodes [thepiratebay.org]. I wish that series had been picked up and continued because there were some very interesting subjects, like the reasons behind certain flavours simply being unable to mix (basil and coffee, for example) as well as an everyman's guide to how the chemistry worked. As innovative as Blumenthal can be, there's no way I'm shelling out £300 for a meal at his restaurant.

I saw some of Heston's latest BBC series. Very entertaining but perhaps not entirely practical - in one of his recipes he made ice cream using liquid nitrogen, and his suggestion for the home enthusiast was to use dry ice instead. I like ice cream as much as the next man, but not to the extent that I'm willing to live through bad 80s disco all over again.

It's not the speed of making it, but rather the texture that comes about from it. Many others have made ice cream using liquid nitrogen, and it is universally hailed as the smoothest ice cream available (at least until someone figures out how to do it with liquid helium). It's one of those things that is often done just for the sheer experience of it.

Molecular gastronomy is partially a scam to sell expensive lab equipment to rich foodies. With that said, I will probably sell out and write articles about the coolest gadgets and techniques. I do like the idea of vacuum pumps as a culinary tool. Sucking and pumping was meant for the kitchen.

Speaking of expensive kitchen gadgets, I had an idea for a device which seems obvious but I haven't seen anywhere. My idea is to attach a vacuum pump to a pot with a sealable lid to achieve the opposite effect of a pressure cooker (or maybe it could double as a pressure cooker too). It seems like a good way to regulate the temperature of a water bath (set the pressure so that the boiling point is the appropriate temperature), but I haven't been able to find anything like that.

I forget whether it was Popular Science or Popular Mechanics, but one of them recently had a big article about this sort of thing, and one of the gadgets they described fits your idea. If you read that article, you could find where to buy and/or how to make one.

"It seems like a good way to regulate the temperature of a water bath"Not really. Your idea only makes sense if you did want to reduce the pressure for some other reason - selectively evaporate stuff - like in fractional distillation.

For temperature control, you use a thermometer/thermostat with feedback.

For example you can soft boil eggs in an oven. You just need to calibrate your oven well. Then if you set it to 65 degrees C and stick the eggs in for an hour, they still won't be hard boiled:).

That's nothing but a new name for an age old process. The process of adding heat to reagents (a.k.a. cooking) is in itself a chemical process.Take baking, for example. For those who've never tried it, baking is a very precise exercise. You have to add precise amounts of reagents, mix them together in a certain order, and add a precise amount of heat for a precise amount of time. That whole undertaking is very chemical in nature. If you time it wrong, add the wrong amount of heat and/or reagents, then you're

That's nothing but a new name for an age old process. The process of adding heat to reagents (a.k.a. cooking) is in itself a chemical process.
The whole "molecular gastronomy" trend is simply applying the same strategy to "warm" dishes.

...which is why I included it in quotes as well. Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman.

Which is why I like cooking French. Quantities and instructions are very precise because they have to be. If you mess with the formula, the dish won't come out right. An ex-girlfriend fancied herself a cook, and was good with Italian dishes but never got the knack for French cooking because it required the kind of precision of which you speak.I also found that as soon as I switched to better pans, my own cooking improved as well, because the heat transfer required by the recipe was now finally taking pla

-certain- things must be just-so, others can be experimented with without ill effects, or easily be corrected if you get off-track. The reason cooking is hard for beginners is that they're not aware of which things belong in which category, so they stress the stuff that isn't actually that critical, or are too sloppy on the few spots where you really need to do it -JUST- so, or both.

If you're making bread it -matters- if the temperature of your liquids is 30C, 38C or 50C. If you're making lasagne it does -not- matter, well theoretically you may need to leave it for 3 minutes longer in the oven... If you triple the amount of chili in your chili con carne the result may be non-edible for non-dragons, if you triple the amount of estragon on your pizza, you get sligthly-more-estragony pizza, nobody will even really notice. (it'll taste a bit different, but not inedible, probably not even bad)

If you're making buns, they'll in general (up to a point anyway) be better if you work the dough more vigorously, perhaps letting them rise multiple times with workings of the dough between. To the contrary, if you're making any kind of sponge-cake where the airness comes from beaten eggs, then you should stir as little as absolutely humanly possible after adding the flour, since otherwise you'll beat-out all the airiness.

So, in short, cooking ain't in general hard at all. There's certain details that you need to pay attention to. It takes some practice or teaching or both to learn which, precisely, that is. You probably need to mess up these things a few times to really learn them. Most people I know have tried the trick of baking pizza with too-warm water once -- most people don't need to do that more than once to get the idea....

It sounds like you've just described most activities that people outside those activities find hard.

Auto mechanics ain't in general hard at all. It's just knowing which nuts and bolts to undo, in which order, and on which part.

Assembling one's own computer ain't in general hard at all. It's just knowing which parts are compatible with which parts, plugging components into each other, and knowing when you are in danger of frying a component due to static electricity and when you aren't.

It reminds me of an anecdote I've heard attributed to Henry Ford but couldn't find after an exhaustive 30 second search on Google. Henry had some equipment that was malfunctioning, and his engineers couldn't figure out what was wrong. He decided to call in the guy, let's call him Bill, who had designed the equipment. Bill spent 45 minutes working on the equipment, got it working, and left. A couple weeks later Henry received an invoice from Bill for $10,000. Henry called Bill up and said, "I know your time is valuable, but don't you think $10k is a little much for twirling a few knobs and bolts?". Bill agreed and said he'd adjust the bill. Henry got an adjusted bill soon afterwards that said, "Adjusting a few knobs and bolts: $1000. Knowing which knobs and bolts to adjust: $9000."

So I've babbled on enough, and I agree with you that once you get into cooking, much of it isn't that daunting, but neither are most other pastimes once you've figured them out.

At the same time baking isn't that precise - there is quite a lot of room for wiggle. This is most noticeable when it comes to heat, as VERY few ovens give you the ability to control the temperature to a single degree, let alone a fraction of one. Also noticeable in that you don't have to plug your heat and time into a formula to account for difference in air density (usually due to distance from sea-level). With that being said, it is a lot more complicated to make a good flavored bread that turns out w

The chemical reactions that make a cake or a loaf of bread is not very different than making a vinegar/baking soda volcano.

Whist baking cakes does tend to rely on sodium bicarbonate reacting with an acid (usually tartaric acid) to produce CO2, and also to a lesser extent on the natural raising agents in eggs, bread is completely different. Bread is risen by the carbon dioxide produced in anaerobic respiration performed by yeast (the same as when brewing), and the alcohol produced then evaporates off when the brad is baked.

By this logic, it should be called food alchemy. Believe it or not, just because you don't know the difference doesn't mean that there isn't one.

The process of adding heat to reagents (a.k.a. cooking) is in itself a chemical process.

One which essentially nobody - including professional food chemists - understands in even the simplest of organic foods. Cooks sure as hell don't - they know how long to fry it, and generally what's going to happen when you fry it, but one mention of the single most prevalent chemical in the reaction, phospholipthene, and you're greeted with a bunch of glassy looks.

You might as well argue that being a coffee barista is a chemist's process too; it turns out that frothing milk - the process of building a colloid from the 40 or so whey caseins and half dozen fats in cow's milk is more complex than broiling steak, baking bread and aging tofu put together. 'Course, they just get a five minute training on it, like a cook does: use at least four ounces of milk, keep the milk as cold as you can, keep the steam a quarter inch under the surface. That's cooking: being oblivious of the chemistry, and focussing on the food.

Molecular gastronomy is a powerful tool for cooks, but it isn't cooking, and it's essentially useless on its own.

Take baking, for example. For those who've never tried it, baking is a very precise exercise.

Nonsense. You can vary the amounts of almost every ingredient in a bread dough by 200% or more and it'll still be just fine.

You have to add precise amounts of reagents, mix them together in a certain order, and add a precise amount of heat for a precise amount of time.

Have you ever baked? At all? Do you know what a bagel actually is? Did you know that if you want a crusty bread, you can just brush the half-cooked loaf with water, then oil, and increase cooking time ~20%? None of those three things you said are true; baking is, with notable rare exceptions like souffle, one of the most forgiving and imprecise forms of cooking there is. You almost couldn't have chosen a less appropriate example, short of slow-roasting meats or curing foods over months.

That whole undertaking is very chemical in nature.

What, because you need a specific amount of a specific stuff and you have to put it in at the right time? By that logic, putting gas in your car is a work of chemistry, as is washing your clothes (and let's not even get started on mixing paint.) Just because something is made out of chemicals doesn't mean using it is chemistry. Humans are made out of chemicals, too, y'know. In fact, everything is. You might want to look up the word "tautology."

If you time it wrong, add the wrong amount of heat and/or reagents, then you're going to end up with some pretty disastrous results.

Ah, so ironing my clothes is chemistry, using hot glue guns is chemistry, soldering is chemistry and alka-seltzer is chemistry. Got it.

You're one of those people who argues that anything you can describe a process for is art, aren't you?

The chemical reactions that make a cake or a loaf of bread is not very different than making a vinegar/baking soda volcano.

The chemical reaction in vinegar volcanoes is a hydrogen exchange salt reaction.

CH_3 COOH + NaHCO_3 --> CH_3 COONa + H_2 CO_3

There are more than two hundred chemical reactions involved in bread, but the one you're probably thinking of is the yeast breaking sugar and alkali into alcohol and carbon dioxide. This is two primary reactions with dozens of variants:

C_6 H_12 O_6 + Therm. --> 2 (C_2 H_5 OH) + 2 CO_2

2 (C_3 H_6 O_3) + K_2 CO_3 --> 2(KC_3 H_5 O_3) + H_2 O + CO_2

The two processes are, in fact, very different. One is a simple chemical reac

I totaly agree, Alton does more than show you recipes. He explains what happens when you;re cooking and why he does things. His cooking show covers everything from butchering to exotic recepies, from appliances to nutritional anthropology with a mix of humour that makes his show "Insert hokey music and lame animation"

Hello all,
Currently I'm doing the Chef part of my life at this time.
What is being described here is very old stuff http://www.foodarts.com/ [foodarts.com] and all this stuff is just commonplace technique nowadays.
Adria, Achatz, Andres I have met or worked with.
It's really not that amazing when you think that we as culinarians are (actually they are), just being creative instead of the things that a lot of people have been eating all along but in a different form.
For instance: Grant Achatz (whom i think is Awesome) guinness that's thickened with Gelatin is just "Jello" "tm" but flavored with beer.
Ferran Adria is the guy you seek if you want to know/learn stuff He invented this whole thing in first place about 10 or 12 years ago and it took the world by storm. He makes drops of olive encase in suger bags.
Hell, there is a gut in chicago that invented a computer printer that makes edible and taste-infused menu's that you eat to before you order your food:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Chicago_chef_invents_edible_menu [wikinews.org].
Anyway, my whole point is: We as chefs, are very creative, funny and dedicated to bring the food world into the computer world accepept as munchies on a late night!

Some of the advanced technology used in food production plants [foodengineeringmag.com] is filtering down to the chef level. The commercial guys have to produce products that are storeable, transportable, and repeatable, so they have a tougher job. If you don't have to do that but have access to commercial technology, a whole range of interesting options open up. One of the

The technique is generally referred to as "molecular gastronomy", and has produced even weirder things than listed in the main article. For example, Dufresne has used "meat glue" (i.e. transglutaminase, which was, IIRC, designed to produce Chicken McNuggets) to make pasta entirely out of shrimp, and another chef has made flavoured edible menus out of soybean and potato starch with fruit and vegetable inks that come in such varieties as steak and sushi. Here's a page with some interesting links on Chow:

Think butter that doesn't melt in the oven, foie gras you can tie into knots, and fried mayonnaise.

I don't want to think about butter that doesn't melt in the oven, or foie gras in knots... and I especially don't want to think too much about fried mayonnaise. Cripes, talk about adding insult to injury.

I don't know if Chemists in general are good with timing. When I was little my mother would start cooking for the day at 8am,making everything from scratch and magically at lunch and dinner all the correct dishes would be finished simultaneously. Now that is an art.Nowadays scientists in universities don't have time for science. They must publish, get grants, do marketing, blah, blah. After a few decades of this they probably don't even know the value of pi. So how the hell do we expect them to get hom

I love Good Eats, but some of the episodes would be better with more information and a little less drama and humor. The first episode I watched was the banana show where he is in a "jungle". Not enough information gained compared to the annoying theater I had to get thru. I never watched another episode until several years later when someone suggested the show to me.

Very interesting, intellectually, but good food is simple: start with good ingredients, don't overcook, and eat in moderation. The last one is important - if you eat until you are close to vomiting, it doesn't matter whether the meal was of good quality. The old saying 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating' means exactly that.

I ate there earlier this year. One of the best meals I've had, but the menu -- while more creative than almost any other I've seen -- had none of the flashy mad scientist concoctions that are so well publicized. If you are in NY and are a bit of a foodie, it's definitely a worthwhile experience. Better than many well publicized restaurants like Babbo (IMHO).

A friend of mine is an excellent chef (mediterranean/mexican fusion with emphasis on seafood), regularly invited to prepare meals in places like Oslo, Paris, London, Evian (Switzerland), San Francisco, Acapulco, etc. No matter what city it is, he splurges on at least one meal at the most celebrated restaurant (according to the gastronomic insiders) in town, and money is no object on these special occasions.

A couple of years ago, while visiting London, my friend and his wife went to Blumenthal's place, The Fat Duck, specifically for the sampler meal at three hundred pounds per person, for two people. Sixteen tiny courses, fifteen of them with their own specific wine.

Just to give you an idea, the first course was a sphere chilled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, handled with chemist's pliers. Within a second of being popped in the mouth, the sphere vaporized and expanded. Containing mostly gas, with some green tea, lemon and vodka, this did three things: cleansed the taste buds, stimulated the appetite and gave an immediate buzz.Supposedly, the fourth or fifth course was the proverbial sledgehammer to the head - a quail jelly on a bed of green pea puree and wheat. That's when the sky cracked open and the meaning of life was telepathically revealed from above. After that it was a two-hour haze of "artistic perfection".

How many of us can say that a certain meal, a sequence of flavor combinations, caused a full-blown epiphany, a mystical experience?

To this day, my friend's eyes glaze and focus off into infinity while remembering "the best meal I've ever had in my life, the best twelve hundred dollars (!!!) I've ever spent". The good wife agrees, even as the Harrod's shopping budget was obliterated by one dinner.

just a side thought: i think animal rights activists should be the most pro-genetically modified special interest group in the world. reason being, if you could genetically engineer foie gras in vats, or animal flesh, you would:

1. feed all of the carnivores, more cheaply, and with less environmental impact2. not harm a single feeling conscious (cue the sad violins) beautiful harmless loving animal. it would be just tissue in vats you were harvesting

of course things like mouthfeel, taste, etc. would need to be technologically refined over time. at first you would be making nothing better than spam. real gastromes would talk about the consistency of the flesh and the subtle flavors based on diet. but you could gradually, over time, approach a meat source that defies the experts to tell the difference from real meat

however, you get the usual luddite reaction from animal rights activists: stop eating meat in the name of cruelty, stop GM food because it's an abomination

animal rights activists should meld their artificial morality (it's certainly impossible in the natural world, outside of civilization) with artifical genetic engineering, and create the nirvana of an animal never harmed

you really think it's harder to do that than convince carnivores to stop eating meat?

On a side note, your little tirade didn't really seem to address the point the GP was making: Do we really need to torture animals before killing & eating them?

We kill 9 billion chickens in the US every year. 9 BILLION. Our selective breeding is so effective that meat chickens go from birth to slaughter in about 8 weeks.

The meat and poultry industry is a nasty, nasty business. Any illusion that we treat meat animals with any sort of dignity goes out the door when you learn how fiendishly optimized the whole affair is.

It is a peculiar thing that we think it's OK to eat animals. I eat meat because it's acceptable to do so in my culture and because I like the taste. I make no claims of moral righteousness. If you're not willing to face up to what needs to happen to get you your meat, you shouldn't be eating meat. I absolutely respect vegetarians (I know several) and particularly vegans for the choice they have made. It is not my choice, but it is one that I can easily justify.

When you really, really get down to it, there's little more inhumane than the breeding of animals for the sole purpose of their later slaughter. How we treat the animals has ramifications for our safety and health, and it is often the most graphic effect of the system. It does not, however, have much to do with the morality of the situation.

In essence, when we have billions of animals created essentially as expendable meat factories, force feeding a few geese seems like small potatoes.

that is, sex with a real child, who is biologically sexually immature. you can bet your archeologist's tenured chair that our ancestors thousands of years ago were bashing the heads of men (and women) who preyed on the prepubescentmeanwhile, teenagers are biologically mature enough for sex. now in modern times, certainly, the issue of TEENAGERS being verboten for sex with adults is a new thing. but that's because we respect the notion of mental immaturity nowadays. so let them experiment amongst themselves,

AFAIK the bonobos also have sex with immature members of their group (google). Seems to work fine for them. I won't be surprised if dolphins and other animals do that too. It's probably just not suitable to show on the National Geographic channel;).Anyway, "natural" is overrated.

Humans should use their big brains and figure out what is good overall and long term. That said the norms of cultures that have survived and _thrived_ for thousands of years should not be discarded overnight without a great deal of

for example, it is not ok to eat your fellow humans, because eating the dead flesh of your own species encourages diseases. in fact, there is a prion disease called kuru, similar to mad cow disease, amongst papua new guineans who dug up and ate their dead ritualisticallylikewise, fucking children incurs the wrath of parents, for good reason: it is their biological role to shepherd their children to adulthood. their interest in that is making sure the child reaches adulthood before mating. because when you a

In fact, sexual mores are not that universal, and there are many societies that do, in fact, tolerate the sexualization of pre-pubescent children.You are attempting to get around a critique of a cruel practice - the production of foie gras, by treating some kinds of moral claims as arbitrary and relative, and then sneaking other types of moral claims into a kind of genetic universal. The data, however, doesn't support it. You have ideas of mate selection and parental investment in them that have a lot more

While I don't really like how animals are treated in large scale farms, I don't think vegetarianism is really the answer. People need a little bit of respect for the things they put in their bodies. Maybe eat a little less meat and buy from local farmers who raise and slaughter their own livestock. It is probably a little bit better for you, and actually has taste (especially chicken).

The debate is centered on the practice of gavage, in which corn is force-fed to farm-raised ducks through a funnel down their throats. Some argue that gavage is inhumane, while others counter that the physiology of a duck is not the same as a human. "It seems terrible if you don't know that a duck's esophagus is lined with a very thick cuticle, if you don't realize that baby ducks are fed by their mother pushing her beak down the baby's throat," says Ariane Daguin, owner of D'Artagnan, the largest foie gras purveyor in the U.S. Recent studies by Dr. Daniel Guémené, a leading expert on the physiological effects of gavage, have shown that ducks with young in the wild were under more stress than the ducks being fed through gavage. And both The American Veterinary Medical Association's House of Delegates and the American Association of Avian Pathologists have concluded that foie is not a product of animal cruelty.

The debate on welfare issues related to the force feeding of ducks and geese involves understanding the reactions of the animals to the force feeding process. Two types of experiment were performed. Ducks and geese were trained to be fed in a pen 8 metres away from their rearing pen and were then force fed in the feeding pen. The hypothesis was that if force feeding caused aversion, the animals would not spontaneously go to the test pen. There were some signs of aversion in ducks, but not full avoidance, and there were no signs of aversion in geese. In another experiment, the flight distances of ducks from the person who performed the force feeding and from an unknown observer were measured. Ducks avoided the unknown person more than the force feeder. Their avoidance of the force feeder decreased during the force feeding period. There was no development of aversion to the force feeder during the force feeding process.

What an ill-informed statement.
Here's a few facts about this so-called "despicable" treatment:
1. Ducks (and geese) are not human. Things that might be uncomfortable to one species are perfectly fine to others. Anthropomorphism is bad, mmm-kay?
2. Ducks (and geese) are designed with a crop, no gag reflex, and an esophagus that is lined with stuff similar to what our fingernails are made of. Why? Because thy are designed to swallow really freaking huge things... like live fish that are flipping around with their tails still protruding from the bird's mouth. Does the bird care? Of course not... it will digest it when it's damn good and ready.
3. Migratory birds are designed to store *tremendous* amounts of fat prior to migration. They do NOT store fat on their hips and thighs (remember the anthropomorphism thing in note #1...). These birds store fat in their liver... it's what they do. It's not "diseased", it's simply stored. Once they stop eating and begin migrating, the fat is used, and the liver goes back to normal. Except, birds on foie gras farms aren't allowed to migrate, for obvious reasons.
4. Commercial chicken farms are far more cruel than foie gras farms, except you don't ever see people picketing restaurants trying to ban the serving of chicken. Odd.
5. There is a direct correlation between the amount of stress on a bird raised for foie gras and the quality of the foie that's produced. The result of this is that modern production methods pretty much dictate that the birds are treated like royalty during their rather brief lives. At Hudson Valley Foie Gras, for instance, once a person has been assigned as the feeder for a group of birds, that person is the *ONLY* person that can touch them... switching the person who is responsible for them just stresses the birds out. Bottom line: when I come back, I hope it's as a foie gras duck, because it pretty much guarantees that I'll live like a rock star, and then die young. Isn't that all anybody really wants?
6. Sheeple that regurgiate PETA bullshit should be thrown off a cliff, because their lack of ability to apply their own critical thinking to a situation is a big part of the reason common sense is being bred out of our gene pool.
7. I just got home from a 6-course foie gras dinner. It was orgasmic.
Thanks. Carry on.

We FORCE chickens to live in pens. Some chickens are FORCED to live in small cages. We FORCE cows to take hormones and antibiotics so they can produce more milk than is natural without becoming diseased. We FORCE veal calves to live in small cages. We FORCE sheep to be sheared. We FORCE cattle, chicken and other animals into corrals for slaughter. We FORCE electricity through their heads, or FORCE bolts into their heads or force cleavers or saws through their necks to kill them for processing.

See, this is what eating meat is all about: FORCING animals to do certain things so that we can eat their flesh, milk and eggs and use their by-products. Just because people look at gavage and say, "that must really hurt the animal," doesn't make it so. In fact, from all evidence available, it isn't detrimental to the animals' health. It certainly doesn't cause "exploding livers" as one poster put it.

In light of all this, it is absolutely relevant that foie gras animals are treated better than the average chicken raised for meat. We force animals to do a lot of things and from all evidence available, forced slaughter is still the most detrimental to the animal.

This "issue" is simply an attempt by animal rights extremists to open the door to further limits on society's ability to use and eat animals (even keep them as pets). It is a gateway issue for them. Don't be suckered into their little games.

"Force feeding" is a bit of a misnomer. It's more like "assisted feeding".Here's the thing... after the duck has been feed using gavage, they will typically go around and pick up any pieces of corn that have dropped on the floor and eat that too. The farmers are simply using technology to improve the efficiency of the process... left to their own devices, the ducks would "force feed" themselves without any help from us. Like I said before - quality of the product is inversely proportional to the stress that

http://www.goveg.com/feat/foie/What a despicable thing to do to an animal just to make it tastier to eat.

Not that I'm defending Foie Gras (not having ever had it, I don't even know whether or not I would like it), but you need to consider your source. PETA is about as far away from sanity as you can get with regards to "animal rights".

Like Greenpeace, PETA is at the fringe of the movement and by linking there you associate yourself with that fringe. If that's what you want, so be it, but if you intend to co

A bit holier-than-thou, sure, but the grandparent post is insane. Foie gras is comparable to chopping up an animal into serving size pieces - while it's still alive. Any slaughterhouse performing such obviously unnecessary cruelty (instead of the usual instant killing blow) would be shut down immediately.

"Foie gras is comparable to chopping up an animal into serving size pieces - while it's still alive."It's not comparable at all. The geese willingly go to get themselves stuffed with food (google). It might not be healthy for them, but whether they get fattened or not they're going to get slaughtered in the end anyway. The farm definitely won't want any of them to die prematurely either.

AFAIK, plenty of people willingly queue up to supersize their meals and themselves.

I can't speak to making it swollen and diseased, but there are good reasons to eat a healthy liver.

It's not so much a filter as it is a neutralizer. The liver produces a very wide array of enzymes that break down toxins. It is also involved in maintaining metabolic balance, digestion of protean and storing energy. The latter plus it's high concentration of vitamins makes it far too nutritionally valuable to ignore. It may not be that critical today in the U.S. where everything's super sized and vitamin su

Enzymes, being proteins, aren't normally absorbed by the body. (Which is why insulin, for example, can't be taken in tablet form.) Also, these enzymes aren't supposed to be floating around in the blood (which is where they'd be if they were absorbed) - Liver function tests [wikipedia.org] measure the presence of these enzymes in the blood, since they show that liver cells have been damaged/lysed, releasing their contents.

"Due to this force feeding procedure, and the possible health consequences of an enlarged liver, animal rights and welfare organizations and activists regard foie gras production methods as cruel to animals. Foie gras producers maintain that force feeding ducks and geese is not uncomfortable for the animals nor is it hazardous to their health. Scientific evidence regarding the animal welfare aspects of foie gras production is limited and inconclusive."

But I would suggest that if you eat a hamburger for lunch and wear leather shoes or a belt, you might want to do a hypocrisy check and see what your score is.

Sanity check time. Eating a cow isn't the same as force feeding a goose until its liver basically explodes so that it's extra tasty.

I spent a large portion of my childhood on a farm and have been through the whole cycle from feeding the calf to walking the adult cow in to get slaughtered. I have absolutely no problem with eating meat, hunting (provided it's done for food or to rid oneself of threats to land and crops, etc. I don't condone pure trophy hunting), and the like. In fact, I've done/do all of them myself.

That said, I can't condone the torture of an animal just because you think engorging its liver will make it yummy. If you raise something for food, treat it with respect, and when it comes time to kill it, make it a clean kill. Doing otherwise shows a lack of respect for the things which keep you alive and, by extension, a lack of respect for yourself.

(Oh, and I wear leather too. Quite a lot of it - coat, belts, several pairs of gloves, multiple pairs of shoes and boots, etc - and I view that as a positive thing. It means that one more part of the animal that helped feed someone gets used toward a positive end instead of being thrown away).

"force feeding a goose until its liver basically explodes so that it's extra tasty."You got to stop getting your info solely from the religious materials distributed by PETA et all. For groups like PETA and the ALF, hardly any science or evidence is involved. They're modern day cults with their Jihad.

Easy sell I guess as war seems so popular nowadays. You have war against foie gras, war against eating animals and so on.

Maybe some farms are cruel to their birds, but cruelty is not necessary (and some argue n